Index for outdoor advertising

For long, there was nothing to show the impact of outdoor advertising to justify the millions of naira spent on it. The Lagos State Signage and Advertisement Agency (LASAA) has come to the rescue, with its introduction of the Outdoor Audience Measurement System (OAMS) in line with global practice. The system will restore advertisers’ confidence in the use of outdoor advertising to promote brands, reports ADEDEJI ADEMIGBUJI.

The Outdoor Advertising industry faces a lot of challenges some of which are multiplicity of taxes, over regulation, the emergence of social media, land speculation and touting. While these challenges have been cited as reasons for its shrinking advertising budget and fortune yearly, little is done about lack of audience measurement, which advertisers often use as the yard stick for determining advertising spend and its effectiveness on brands success.

At a presentation, the President of Media Independent Practitioners Association of Nigeria (MIPAN), Mr. Tolu Ogunkoya, said outdoor spend declined from 40 per cent to 27 per cent between 2010 and 2011.

Reacting to the decline, Babs Fagade, publisher of Outdoor Republic said: “What can be attributed to the lack of justification for spends on outdoor by advertisers is the absence of matrix and reliable data.”

Indeed, what is affecting the industry, most is audience measurement. These worries appear over as the Lagos State Government has introduced the Outdoor Audience Measurement System (OAMS). The system produces audience estimates for Out-of-Home advertising and the data captures how many people saw an advertisement, how often they saw it and the profile of those who saw it.

The system fundamentally changes the focus of outdoor media planning from panels to audience. It is designed around people’s daily movements on a hyper-local level, making it possible for planning by each geographical area at day time.

How it works

The system, the first of its kind in West Africa, follows the global practice of published audience research for radio, television and press. It will produce audience estimates for Outdoor advertising.

The published data will tell advertisers how many people see an Outdoor advertising campaign in specific locations in the state as well as how often they do so. The audience will be broken down into many typologies, including age, sex, class, and lifestyle. The information is expected to be used by advertisers in planning and evaluating advertising campaigns in the Outdoor medium.

The need to introduce audience measurment has become a subject of debate in the last 50 years when outdoor advertising business started, but the Managing Director of LASAA, Mr. George Noah, said: ‘’This is a defining moment in outdoor advertising practice in Nigeria. For advertisers to make informed buying decision, data analysis of the target audience is very essential.

“Outdoor advertising markets in developed economies are flourishing because data is available for both buyers and sellers of outdoor spaces to make informed choices and careful planning. We need to embark on a scientific audience research measurement to enable the sector compete favourably with radio, TV and press.”

Noah said the Outdoor sector needs a people focused measurement system which will analyse audience estimates.

In his words: “Scientific audience measurement will provide details of Realistic Opportunity To See (ROTS) with eye-tracking studies which will gauge the likelihood to see (LTS) factor of the various types of display. This will also account for scale, orientation, distance, movement, illumination and spatially analyse the sites in relation to competitors, customer locations as well as traffic patterns.”

He promised that traffic audit would offer immense value to advertisers in accurate audience figures and also encourage advertisers in making informed outdoor advertising purchase.

“The medium is changing at a rapid rate and we must think from the point of view of the audience, not from the position of a billboard structure. If we start with a deep knowledge of how people move about, advertisers can have the flexibility to decide what they put in their way in terms of communication opportunities.

He said by defining the audience, it will be possible to use the data to plan, trade and compute valuation for the medium, adding: “We need to encourage outdoor advertisers to consider more populated areas, such as Ikorodu and Alimosho. The LASAA Outdoor Audience research we believe, will reveal the marketing potential of previously ignored areas.”

Global examples

The Lagos initiative followed breakthroughs in Europe and America. Only recently, ROUTE, an outdoor audience advertising measuring system, was launch in the United Kingdom (UK) where there has been a huge £19million investment in its research. Also, a report by Outdoor Republic, a publication for outdoor advertising, stated that the launch of POSTAR in the UK in 1996 marked a further improvement in measurement with the audience estimation process involving six stages: Traffic counts, Pedestrian counts, Coverage, Estimate of dispersion factors, Visibility Adjusted Impacts (VAIs) and Refinements (illumination factors). This is an indication of a continuous study dating back to 1952 when travel patterns were conducted among 5,359 people in nine towns.

Also, the Traffic Audit Bureau (TAB) in the United States of America introduced EYES ON Impressions (EOIs) as the new audience measurement currency for buying and selling out of home media in the US, to replace Daily Effective Circulations(DEC) as the core metric.

EOIs represent the average number of persons who are likely to notice an ad viewed on an outdoor display. EOIs are available in all US media markets and are reported as weekly impressions, reporting all demographic audiences available to other media. This helps marketers to understand the true value of the medium when combined in a multi-media campaign.

In 2005, Nielsen Outdoor in collaboration with South African Advertising Research Foundation (SAARF), the advertising industry sponsored body that controls advertising audience research in South Africa harnessed the power of the GPS through the market-proven Npod™ device (Nielsen Personal Outdoor Device) to provide demographic audience information plus reach, frequency and outdoor ratings data, to all SAARF stakeholders — advertisers, agencies and outdoor media companies. Outdoor media buyers and sellers in South Africa got empowered to use audience measurements that are similar to traditional ratings data used to plan radio, television and print.

In 2007, Outdoor Finland released an audience measurement system that provides the planners and buyers of outdoor advertising with commensurate and reliable performance indicators. Visibility Adjusted Contact (VAC), which is more highly developed and appreciably more precise than the traditional performance indicators used by the media. The Outdoor Impact system is based on a landmark international research concept as well as on extensive Finnish research and research data. A project conducted by Outdoor Finland and the association’s corporate members, Clear Channel and JCDecaux, that lasted many years, and was the largest development investment in the industry’s history in Finland. Key of note is that the system is based on an international concept derived from the well-known British POSTAR.

Upon the birth of this in Finland, the association’s Executive Manager was quoted to have said: “The system’s enhanced measuring accuracy substantially boosts the competitiveness of outdoor advertising in Finland. Now advertisers can use precise facts and figures on outdoor advertising, so they can be certain about what they’re buying. We fully expect Outdoor Impact to increase outdoor advertising’s share of the media market.”

In February 2010, the Outdoor Media Association (OMA) launched Australia’s first industry-wide audience measurement tool for outdoor media known as MOVE (Measurement of Outdoor Visibility and Exposure). MOVE is owned by the OMA and its five largest members – APN Outdoor, EYE, Adshel, oOh!media and JCDecaux. The OMA represents the interests of other OMA Media Display Members with inventory in the MOVE system.

With this new system introduced in West Africa by LAASA, industry observers, especially advertisers, believe the outdoor advertising budget will increase.